 we presented briefly last year about a project that we were embarking on which was to help transfer our grades from Moodle into our student record system, which at the university of Bath is S grace tribal, it's a project that our developers, John and Ateisha have been working on for the last year and a half being leading it is a tel team across the institution. We are looking at automatic transfer grades because we've seen a massive increase in online summative assessment on our mutual courses. Both in specifically the assignments and also the quizzes and the feedback we get from staff continually, it's like oh now I've got to download these grades and somehow get them into the student record system and then add it on the complexity of an anonymous marking on top of that, it can sometimes be quite a challenge for them. Mae ydych yn cael ei amser y cyflaedd yma yn gweithio'r perthyn ryw hwnnw sydd ar ôl i'n meddwl ceisio'r cw говорa i'w gwirgrifedd y sydd yn gallu'r cyfan i ddweithio'r syndwyll wedi eu cyfrifegnod son a'r cyfrifegnodau sydd yn cael ei pryd ac yn siŵr gwaith straff. Mae'r cw為wch chi, mae'n rhaid i gael o'r ffaith gafelwyd wedi gweithio 22,000 gwirgrifeddfalls yn ddwy o ddwy, ond o rhaid o 4,000 dŵwydd yn hyn yn swyddfa. aceddaf am gyda ni i ddweud olygu a gwybod wahanol. Rhywun oedd y gwerthwynt gweithio ar gyflogwr gwahanol oherwydd yr arferlau gwahanol yr ystyried o fynd wedi gweithio. Rwy'n eistedd i gydag i gydag y dyfodol i phobl gåch yn ddweud o gwybiedig i'r twm, a'r rofyniad, ac olygu i'r ffyrdd cymdeithas arlo eich ddwylo cyfanol a'r moodydd ar yr holl yn eich ddiwedd â'r system cysylltu. O where we are at, we rolled out with the solution about a week, or sort of two weeks ago, so we're just about sort of keeping an eye on it to see what's happening. And we're expecting the main bulk of people to be starting to use the tool after Easter when the sort of silent marking takes place. We've worked very closely with our student records team. Our developers here are been doing on the coding and testing. We ran a small pilot last year, so we have a sort of sense of how it goes, and then we've been providing sort of training and development ever since. One of the things for a project like this, first of all, for us as our team, it's really helped us to open our eyes to some of the processes in other teams across campus. It's particularly the sort of student records team. I think it's probably fair to say that the complexity of a student record system in universities mind boggling to those who aren't using it every single day and the amount of exceptions and oddities that occur and how you then programme for that has been a real challenge. We've been working also with our professional service teams, specifically the faculty support, to try and have a unified approach to how staff can transfer their grades on the VLE. And also with our registry, our sort of quality department to make sure that everything is absolutely, we're sure that the right grade is ending up in the right box in the student record system. There were lots of quality controls and checks that we had to go through to satisfy our registry team. Just to give you an example of what the plug-in does, how we've created it, we've got two different plug-ins. One is a local plug-in that will come in later, shows you how to select a mapping to the grades you want to transfer to. And the second plug-in gives you an overview of what has not been transferred and will be a transfer option. So we have a student record system called SITS, which has a plug-in to expose web services called STUTOC. We've used that for the grades transfer. So what it does is it exposes a REST API, which is just a web service call. We tap into that web service and we basically exchange XML saying there's a grade to be put in and here's a grade, fill that XML and set it back. So basically that's what does in a nutshell. It took the vendor a couple of months to get that sorted, but we're finally there now. So just to give you an overview of what the functionalities of this plug-in are is we support anonymous assessments, which does not mean that we support blind marking, but we support if an assessment is anonymous in the student record system, we kind of get the number behind the scenes and send that through Moodle. So we don't need to know what student belongs to, but behind the scenes we are still doing the work so that it goes anonymously in SAMHIS or SITS. We have a queuing functionality, which is basically instead of sending it ad hoc at that point, we are queuing it in an ad hoc task, which is a Moodle API. I'll come to that in a second on why we use that. Lock mappings, once you transfer a grade from A to B, we don't want academics to switch their assessment location to confuse us or the students. So once a grade has been transferred successfully, it kind of locks it, so unless you unlock it or get admins to unlock it, you can't transfer to a different one. It's just to maintain sanity I suppose. Transfer history is just, I think it's a feature we wanted for admins so that we can see what has happened over time just to keep an eye on everything's going well as part of our pilot. I'll speak about one or two features and I'll pass on to my colleague to speak of the rest. So as I said, students mark anonymous in the record system and we use a candidate field behind the scenes to map it internally. But we don't support blind marking in Moodle as of yet. I'm not sure if that's a plan to do so. So blind marking needs to be lifted Moodle first so that we can send it through to the student record system. The second one is queuing functionality. Like I said, stew talk is really, really slow because we do four or five web service calls and to transfer single grade at that point it takes about nine seconds. We thought that was not acceptable. This was the same reason we queue it in the ad hoc queue. So you can have 15 grades all queued in about three seconds and then the Cron can do its job to send it to Samus or Sitz. That's jQuery powered so we're just using simple Moodle dialogues to send that through. This is the new section we created on the assignment settings. There's only two settings on here. One is the actual assessment you're trying to map to within the student record system. And the second one, which is optional, is the time that you maybe want it to automatically do the grade transfer behind the scenes. If you don't select that, you would have to do the grade transfer manually by clicking a button, which we think might be the preferred option anyway. When you load this page, it actually contacts the student record system in real time and updates the list here so the drop down is up to date. Unfortunately, to actually create this new section within the assignment settings, we had to do a Moodle call hack. But it's a hack that we think we can live with. It only a few lines long so we think we're okay with that. This again is the same section, but this is after a grade's been transferred. As you can see, we've got a few new things happen here. We've got a new unlock mapping box, but this is only visible to admins. So we don't want teachers to be able to do this unlocking. The drop down menu is now locked, is now disabled, so you can't change it. And there's a little note in there to say it's in use, and obviously you can't change the transfer date either. Now, the one thing we're worried about here was, in fact we'll go to the next slide. So the locking, the mappings, the main reason behind it is if a teacher was to create a mapping into the student record system and then do some transfers, then realise they made a mistake, go back in again, change it to what they think is correct and then do some more transfers, they're basically scattering their grades throughout the student record system, and it's just going to be a nightmare to correct. So if somebody does make a mistake, they can only make a mistake once, and then come and speak to somebody, you can actually fix it. So that was the main idea behind the locking. So this is a grade report plug-in, which is part two of our integration. As you can see, we've got mapping attributes to say this is what you've mapped to, so you can be doubly sure that this is the right home where it goes to. We have a grade status which says 6 out of 86 have been transferred and you have others to do. It's just a shortcut to go back to the grades, grade book and grade again if you want to. Transfer status, which is you can either schedule a transfer going back to the previous screen, or you can do it ad hoc, which is a transfer all button, which just gives you... So grades that have been graded, you can hit transfer all, it'll give you a summary of are you sure you want to do this and just go. The next bit of that page is on the next slide. It's very similar to how a grade report looks like, which is user details, the grade they have been given when they were last graded by an academic, and if they have been transferred, we just confirm that by saying they've transferred 55. We have several outcomes which John will speak in a minute to say at what stage the grade transfer is at. As mentioned before, we have the history button to see what has been done with that particular grade, and you can also individually, either if you see the checkbox, you can select as many as you want or just do one at a time. One of the main problems with integrating a third-party system is lots of unexpected things might happen, so we're very aware that we needed to log pretty much everything. So we have lots of outcome codes for lots of different things. Some of them are related to failures in the other system, some of them are related to configuration problems that the teachers created. Something like maybe one of our policies is all grades must be out of 100 in the student record system. If that's not the case, we have to log that, don't do the transfer. So we've got a whole set of outcomes that helps us as admins to actually fix problems that maybe people have created. So also once we've logged all these outcomes, I don't know if you saw on the grade transfer report there was an extra button that admins could see to click and we could get a full, well, the last 20 records. Obviously we don't expect maybe 20 records. The example up here is for one that worked perfectly successfully, but maybe if a teacher had a repeated problem and they were getting frustrated with it, we'd be able to go through the logs, find out exactly what happened, and advise them on how to fix that problem. Before we could deploy the code, we had to make sure we had a few quality standards we had to meet. We used PHP Storm as a programming tool and we got the coding standards from the Moodle site and we could install them into PHP Storm and that ensured that all of our code was Moodle compliant. After that, we also had to have our code checked by our hosting partner and they did a full review of the code and actually passed it as fine. That's basically just a check that we haven't done anything nasty that might compromise the SLA, so that has been very helpful as well. The pilot that we did initially, we tried to do it across a range of subjection across campus. The one that really stands out, we worked very closely with the social and policy sciences department who perhaps do the most traditional sort of form of assessment in terms of long assignments, so that's probably why there's been such a huge uptake. Also internally in their department, they were trying to push for 100% online marking and assessment which they've now achieved. We're working very much closely with them to use the tool to help push the grades across. One of the problems is an institution we've found, online marking has drifted in across the years and anonymous marking drifted in across the years as well. The different faculties and departments have ended up with their own approaches to how they deal with the marking process. One faculty for instance last year spent six months trying to map the assignment process. It's devilishly complicated when you add anything, it's like blind marking, moderation and all the rest of it. The faculties have ended up with a different approach. In addition to rolling out this tool, we've also been doing a lot of work, process mapping across the teams to try and streamline the process. One of the other changes that we made is that in our mood all the roles for users, we created a brand new role called Teacher Plus which we have given, that's the user who can actually transfer the grades. We also wanted to know who had the right to press the transfer button. Anyone who's a teacher on that course can mark the work but we've limited the ability to transfer it to what we call the unit convener so the person who has overall control of that module. At the moment that's the only information we can pick out of our student record system who we know who's on that module and has the right to teach on it. As that changes, we might give other people the ability to transfer the grades as well. As an institution that is a TAIL team, it's really useful to have a better sense of what summative assessment is actually happening on Moodle at the moment unless the lecture marks something as formative or summative. There's no real way of identifying if something's actually been summatively assessed on Moodle. By mapping these assessment points to assessment points in our student record system in the future, we should get a better understanding of where a summative assessment is actually happening in our VLE. As you expect with a large integration like this one which took more than a year, we had quite a few challenges to overcome. I'd say we'd learn a lot but some of them here are, if you remember I had said you can queue 10 to 15 grades and then you can list them and then queue them in one go because every queuing is an Ajax process. It was kind of rate limiting the server but after a while server said I can't take that page anymore so you have to stop doing it. So I think we got external host. I'm looking at Simon here to actually up that limit for that page. So that helped. Multiple occurrences. This is a tricky one. You can have a cohort with students who are on different occurrences in the same year. This was tricky because you would not get the right student from the web service to send back to. So we had to work around this with our SITS slash SAMS team. Proxy issues because Moodle is hosted externally and our SAMS or SITS is hosted internally, we had to solve proxy so that everyone can talk to each other without any problems. So that was a learning curve. And generally we made sure the quality of the data in SRS was as accurate as possible which is getting the right data from SITS, matching that up to Moodle and sending a right grade back. So just on that point, when you saw the drop down menu where the electric can map the assignment, that information is coming directly from the information in the student record system. So one of the added benefits of this tool we hope is to start cleaning up that data. So when a lecturer logs in just sees essay, essay, essay, essay, essay, essay, in order to map their assignment correctly they need to know which essay that's mapping to for that module. So hopefully the quality of the data that's containing the student record system will also slowly improve over time as well. So the plans lie ahead, obviously we've just released it so we are very keen to work with our academic colleagues to see how it goes. As a wider project for the university we're also thinking about how we might merge this plugin that's been developed into a bigger suite of plugins. So we're currently looking at, we've already got a tool that brings our students in from the student record system but we're looking at a much bigger project about what we actually bring into our VLE from our different data sources automatically. So one potential now we have this tool in place is do we think about automatic creation of assessments in our VLE from our student record system. So rather than getting the lecturer to map the assignment themselves it could actually be created and mapped automatically and locked down as a process. That's something we're thinking about, we haven't chosen to go down that yet but we're keeping that in mind. And the next stage we're just doing testing currently only works on the assignment and John Natesha just coded it for the quiz and we're just testing that to make sure that it will work for the middle quizzes as well. Thank you very much. Any questions? Hi, we've been looking at doing something similar at the moment and we've found there's, we have quite a lot of students going through reassessments so do you handle reassessments or do you just limit it to initial assessments only? This is for just the main assessment point. So when we ask lecturers to map their assignment in the assignment creation point once that's mapped to an assignment in the student record system it's locked down so unless the reassessment is added as a separate submission point assessment point in the student record system they won't be able to use the tool so they'll have to manually mark that and transfer it themselves separately. Okay and within the VLE, do you know which students are currently going through reassessment? We wouldn't necessarily be able to expose that in the VLE directly but we can get that from the student record system but I don't know if we would easily identify that from the student and from the VLE at the moment. Okay thank you. We've been looking at this as well and we've found that at least on our Moodle one entry for assessment in the student record system didn't necessarily mean one single activity in Moodle. Did that happen for you? Yep, so the classic is that on the module outlines that's been validated by the university or say like 50% essay and in reality the lecturers delivering that as 5%, 10% individual assignments but that's not recorded anywhere. So it can only be a one-to-one mapping with our tool so if you're doing it it won't work so we've said to lecturers you have to go and change that in the unit documentation so then there are five drop boxes in the student record system to put the grade into. Yeah I don't think that would work at us. We kind of went down the route of creating a column in the grade book and getting the, well we haven't actually implemented it yet but then getting the academics to move in the actual items that they use for that piece of assessment into the category and then exporting that. So one of the things our student record system team right from the outset absolutely said we don't really want staff playing around with that in the VLE and we certainly don't want staff waiting things in the VLE or trying to do any form of calculation in the VLE that's got to be done in the student record system and one of the other reasons why we went down the call hack approach so we did speak to Moodle last year and we showed off the tool and one of the reasons why we didn't do it in the grade book end is our staff don't get it and they mess it up and they start doing weird and wonderful calculations and then they don't quite know how they've managed to end up with what they've got so we wanted to try and keep staff well away from that as possible. Hi. I just thought I'd mentioned that over at Croydon College we're doing something similar with FE integrations with things like ProMonitor which are piloting at the moment so that might be useful for anyone out there, any colleges. I think the approach that we're taking is looking over stuff over in our case it's pro solutions getting the information from courses into the assignment for a plug-in that way all the units could be selected through a drop-down and then you can assign various scales and outcomes to this and then just export data from the grade book seems to be quite a simplistic way of doing it so if everything does seem to look pretty good. One thing is, so we haven't put it in call because it's very specific. We've done loads of stuff that's very specific to us but we're very happy to talk to other institutions about what the approach that we've taken and I'm sure that Jon and Tash would be happy to expose the code as well see what we've been doing with it as well and we're happy to learn from others as well. We had a similar issue with the common identifiers between the CITS, the centralized system and how Moodle is used. The problem is coming from both sides. The centralized system administrators do not want to change their approach to modeling common identifiers. Tutors on the other side do not want to change their own way of tutoring and marking and if you have to go in the middleware to create another layer of actually say mapping to what CITS has got and what Moodle's got to be honest it's a lot of politics around and it's not a technical issue so for example the 50% is going actually to 20 small activities or one activity goes to three CITS codes and I don't know it's not an easy thing to resolve. One thing that might work in our favor is the next year the university is embarking on what the schooling curriculum transformation so every program will go through a review so we have the option now to go in with these teams and actually try and get that assessment pattern right from the start and iron out some of these kinks that have occurred over time. Yes it's certainly, so one of our faculty is the faculty of humanities who perhaps does the most amount of online assessments actually has dual submission. Some mark online, some mark on paper, some mark on paper but put the mark in online and it's an absolute muddle when the candidate number which is produced from the student record system is not a unique identifier, it gets reused and then how they match the up and it's been an absolute nightmare. So yes I share the pain. So thank you very much, this was the last presentation so now is lunchtime.